Alex around the World

… but do people know that?

I remember when I was building my first websites. I did everything from A to Z, from the graphic elements to the HTML coding. Usually, these sites had a very easy structure: one “home page”, one “contacts” page, one “about us” page and several content pages.

But web design has evolved and new disciplines are involved. A client used to hire a generalist, someone who would do everything, from design to implementation, including server configuration. Now, your needs are more important. In an ideal world, you would have a whole team of specialists designing your websites: User experience specialists, Interface designers, coders, IT/Server specialists, graphic designers, CSS experts, etc.

This will certainly require web developers to spend some time in explaining what they do, what their specialty is (e.g. “What does an Information Architect or an Interface Designer do, and more importantly, what does he NOT do?”).

Adaptive Path’s article shows that it will take time until the general public (and most important, the clients) understands what web design / web development is all about.

But we’re getting there…

I was asking myself this question the other day: “Should all web projects start with research?”. In other words, whenever you start creating a new website, should you always analyze your target audiences and create personas for example?

I always thought the answer to this question was yes. In fact, it depends. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is just what I needed!

I was discussing a few ideas that should help us move away from our usual approach of design for our websites, which is now becoming a bit … outdated:

(see www.unctad.org or www.unctadxi.org).

We’re building a new site for a Conference, and I wanted to have something more trendy or even sexy. I like this whole approach of using grid-based approach to find the right balance between the layout, the level importance of each element on the page and the general look and feel.

Smashing Magazine just published an article about this technique. I’m sure they’re not the first ones, but it happens that I bumped into this article a few hours after the discussion with my colleagues…

Get your own web 2.0-like logo so that everyone thinks you’re developing the next killer app!

Read the easy-to-follow tutorial on hongkiat.com and become famous.

Don’t forget to put “beta” somewhere in your logo